Many high speed measurement systems acquire many gigabytes per second (GB/s) of data and dump the acquired data to local memory for later processing, particularly when that processing is complex and highly reconfigurable. Dumping to local memory can be done, for example, to maintain throughput. In some cases (e.g., transient measurements or pulsed radio frequency (RF) measurements) only localized portions of the data are of interest and only the relevant portions need be processed to improve system throughput. In the case of quasi-periodic or triggered events, data is marked so that the events can later be identified. This is acceptable when the sampling rate is not extremely fast relative to the event rate. However, when the sampling rate is extremely fast, much time is spent looking for the marking events and large amounts of data may be transferred in intermediate stages that waste memory and time. In addition, in complex triggering situations the marking may not be available at the first transient event and important information is lost.